[swift-evolution] Winding down the Swift 3 release

[Chris Lattner]

On May 16, 2016, at 2:27 PM, Eric Wing via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> I'm not an expert in the Linux communities needs and desires.  That said,
>> from what I understand, they don’t care at all about ABI stability, since
>> everything is typically built from source.
> 
> Not exactly true. (I care.)
> 
> Video games (e.g. Steam/Linux) care deeply about ABI stability. And
> Android cares deeply about ABI stability. Also, kind of emergent
> behavior, Raspberry Pi Raspbian has kind of built a platform that
> happens to have some ABI stability for now.

Great to know, and good point.  From that perspective, a Steam/Linux project would be in the same category as an iOS or Mac app: ABI stability doesn’t matter, so long as you include a copy of the swift standard library along with the steam app itself.  I know nothing about Steam, but it seems likely that this would have been a requirement anyway, because you can’t count on the standard library already existing.

ABI stability starts to matter when you’re interested in combining precompiled libraries built by different parties, which are only distributed in binary form.

-Chris